No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

a psychopath than spend another minute in there. In their own house. But somehow it didn’t feel like theirs any more. It didn’t feel like home.

Kirsty was right – all Bram wanted was a nice safe place where the people he loved could be secure and happy. Was that too much to ask?

He had never understood people like Steph from uni, whose ultimate ambition was to travel the world, to live in exotic places among strangers. When Steph had enthused all about her latest trip to Italy or Turkey or Vietnam, Bram had always felt like enthusing about his own holiday spent in his parents’ house in Primrose Hill, the wonderful, hilarious dinner parties with all their friends, the chats with neighbours, the casual popping in to people’s houses to see what they’d done with the garden. It was people who imbued places with meaning, so how could anywhere populated by strangers possibly have more allure than the cities and towns and houses that contained the people you loved?

He hefted the pails and plodded back to the house. In the downstairs loo, he flicked on the light. The toilet hadn’t been flushed in a while and it was pretty grim. As he reached for the toilet brush, he saw it.

The mandala that he and Phoebe had drawn on the wall above the loo roll holder, so laboriously, with a compass, had had the words ‘STUPID HIPPY SHIT’ scrawled across it in black marker pen.

Bram reeled away.

It was like he was here; the intruder was here with him in this cramped space, shouting at him.

He was here.

In the house.

He was one of the people they’d invited into their house.

Bram rocketed out of the loo and down the corridor to the Walton Room. David and Linda were sitting on the sofa with plates of food on their knees, and he found himself blurting out that the intruder was here, he’d vandalised the mandala –

‘Come and see!’

David took one look at the mandala and nodded grimly. ‘Okay. I’ll sort this, Bram.’ The look he gave Bram was dismissive, as if he was resigned to the fact that Bram wasn’t going to step up.

‘What is it?’ said Linda, coming after them, her stick tapping the wall. They hadn’t brought Bertie to the party as it had been felt he’d not cope well with the combination of all the food and attention.

‘The bastard has defaced Phoebe’s wee drawing, love. Right.’ David squared his shoulders. ‘None too bright, this joker. Probably has the marker pen still on him. And I know just where to start.’

‘No, David,’ said Linda. ‘You can’t go around accusing people with no evidence.’

‘I’m not going to accuse anyone. All I’m going to do is ask those lads to turn out their pockets.’

‘It amounts to the same thing.’

David marched past her and off down the corridor.

‘Don’t let him do anything stupid, Bram,’ Linda begged.

Bram hurried after David, through the Walton Room, through the kitchen, through the Room with a View to the terrace, where the teenagers were still gathered.

‘Right, you,’ said David, pointing at Finn. ‘And you, and you, and you.’ He jabbed a finger at each of the boys. ‘Pockets. Let’s see what you’ve got in them. Turn them out. Contents on the table.’

Finn just looked at him, smiling slightly and shaking his head.

One of the men from the group by the barbecue had come over. ‘What’s the problem here?’ One of the dads, presumably.

‘Vandalism,’ said David. ‘One of these wee buggers has vandalised my nine-year-old granddaughter’s artwork.’

‘In the downstairs loo,’ Bram elaborated. ‘Someone’s scrawled across it in black marker pen.’

And oh no, there was Phoebe, standing next to Fraser helping him with the burgers, along with her three friends. Phoebe had a roll in one hand and a buttery knife in the other, staring across at them. Bram hurried over to her.

‘Okay, Phoebs, let’s go inside and–’

‘The mandala?’ she whispered. ‘Someone vandalised the mandala?’

Bram nodded. ‘But we can paint over it and do another, can’t we? An even better one.’

‘Who did it?’ She looked up at him. ‘Why did they do it?’

Bram cupped a hand over her head. ‘I don’t know, kleintje.’

‘Let’s be having you, lads,’ said David. ‘Contents of pockets on the table, now.’

One of the boys was complying, placing a wallet and keys on the picnic table, and pulling out the insides of his jeans pockets to show they were now empty. But Finn and the others hadn’t moved.

‘And what makes you think it was any of them?’ the dad demanded.

‘This is discriminatory,’ Finn drawled. ‘You’re accusing us because of our age and sex. It could have been anyone. And what gives you stop and search powers anyway, Grandad?’

‘That’s right,’ said the dad, squaring up to David. ‘You’ve got a cheek, laying down the law to other folks’ kids. It’s usually you on the receiving end of the law, eh, McKechnie? What gives you the right to get in these lads’ faces and–’

David, completely unperturbed, flicked a glance over at Bram.

The message was clear.

Are you a man or a mouse?

‘This is our home!’ Bram found himself suddenly shouting, striding across the terrace towards them. ‘That’s what gives him the fucking right! Get out! I want everyone out of this house and off our property now!’

It took an hour to get Phoebe into bed and off to sleep. On top of the traumas of the mandala being vandalised and watching her dad lose it, she was having to deal with the worry of what was going to happen with the Miller girls. Their parents had appeared on the terrace just as Bram was launching into his sweary diatribe, and had whisked their three young daughters away at once. ‘Will they let us be friends now, Dad?’ Phoebe kept asking.

He descended the stairs wearily. He found the family in the kitchen, Linda, Max and David sitting at the table and Kirsty and Fraser clearing up.

‘Well, I’ve done it now, haven’t I,’ said Bram, collapsing onto a chair. ‘And to think that